Constructing Flavor: Plants vs. Zombies

Constructing Flavor focuses on Magic decks built around a particular flavor or lore theme. These can be focused around a particular tribe, storyline, character, or concept; if it’s flavorful, we wanna see it! If you have a themed deck you’d like to see featured in this column, send the list to firesidemagic@gmail.com.

When Innistrad was originally released, I saw the card Grave Bramble and immediately started cackling with glee. I immediately recognized the tribute to PopCap’s wonderful tower defense game, Plants vs. Zombies, and I was inspired to recreate the game in the world of Magic. I built one deck each to represent the Plants team and the Zombies team, and in typical Duel Decks fashion, tried to balance them against each other as much as possible.

The decks were badly unbalanced and it didn’t go well, but with the release of Plants vs. Zombies 2 looming closer every day, I thought this would be a good time try again. My problem was that the Zombies deck was always much more powerful than the Plants deck, and the general nature of Magic’s “dueling” didn’t really capture the feel of tower defense. Luckily, I discovered a variant that seems to capture the flavor of PvZ perfectly: Horde Magic.

In a nutshell, here’s how the variant works:

Players fight as a team against a single Horde deck, which is autopiloted

The Horde deck is constructed of 60% creature tokens

Each turn after the 3rd, the Horde deck flips over cards until it reveals a non-token, then casts them all. All Horde creatures have haste and attack each turn if able.

The Horde deck takes damage in the form of milling cards, and loses when the deck is empty

You can click the above link for more detailed rules, but those are the basics: simply survive until the Horde runs out. Seeing as that’s the theme of PvZ too, Horde seems perfect.

It’s clear from looking at these lists that these decks are not very good. Let’s remedy that by scrapping what we don’t need and keeping the stuff that works well, and then we can rebuild with Horde in mind.

Zombie Horde Deck

First thing we need to do to get our Zombie deck ready to horde is remove any spell that isn’t autopilot-friendly. The Horde deck has infinite mana and no hand or life total, but must be able to run itself. Things like targeting, life gain, most activated abilities, and card draw are simply out of its wheelhouse. This takes care of Cemetery Reaper, Cyclopean Giant, Dead Reckoning, Deepwood Ghoul, Fleshbag Marauder, Ghoulcaller’s Chant, Graveborn Muse, Gutless Ghoul, Stir the Grave, Zombie Infestation, and all Equipment and Land.

Fortunately, the remaining steps are easy: we throw in 55 Zombie tokens and 5 Zombie Giant tokens, do a quick Gatherer search for Zombies and Zombie-related cards, and fill the deck with the baddest undead ghouls we can find. The new Horde deck now looks like this:

When exploring the Plants’ avenues to victory, I pondered several strategies. Do I focus on defensive Plants with a finisher of the Avenger of Zendikar variety, as the prototype did? Do I go Treefolk Tribal (seeing as trees are plants too) and attempt to overrun with Doran, the Siege Tower? Or do I pump out an never-ending swarm of Saprolings to chump-block until the Zombies beg for mercy?

And then I thought, por qué no los tres?, and went to work building a Commander deck.

Our previously-mentioned buddy Doran is the easy pick for a commander here. His GWB (“Junk”) color identity allows for the leafy green Plants we know we’ll need, in addition to some auxiliary off-color trickiness. The deck will be loaded with high-toughness creatures, back-breaking late-game effects, and hopefully at least a few ways to make gobs and gobs of Saprolings.

Let’s start by pulling from the original deck all the Plant defenders and their friends that will make a return here. Utopia Tree is nice ramp and color fixing, and reminds me of PvZ’s Sunflower. Magus of the Vineyard, a.k.a. Crazy Dave, completely loses his downside when we’re playing against a deck with intrinsic infinite mana. And since the original deck didn’t have a lot of post-Innistrad contributions, it’ll be happy to (finally!) add Grave Bramble, in addition to Tree of Redemption and Gatecreeper Vine.

Since so many of those Plants have defender, we should throw in some cards that care about that. Rolling Stones allows our Plants to join the fight and take advantage of Doran’s ability, and Axebane Guardian is similarly a no-brainer. Perimeter Captain, Stalwart Shield-Bearers, and Wakestone Gargoyle aren’t very flavorful, but they do nice things for defenders and give this deck some much-needed staying power. Plus the first two have very appropriate flavor text.

On the Treefolk side of things, there are more than enough goodies that deserve adding:

Black Poplar Shaman keeps his fellow Trees alive

Bosk Banneret is good acceleration

Deadwood Treefolk blocks well and recurs things from my graveyard

Fendeep Summoner turns Swamps into blockers

Indomitable Ancients aren’t dying from combat anytime soon

Lumberknot is going to get huge, especially if we get a good Saproling sacrifice outlet going

Nemata, Grove Guardian could be that aforementioned outlet

Orchard Warden gives us a little more life gain

Thorntooth Witch seems like she’d be good at killing Zombies

Timber Protector can make it very, very hard for the Zombies to gain ground

Treefolk Harbinger finds any of these, turn 1!

Treefolk Healer can essentially block two Zombies per combat

Verdeloth the Ancient has no good reason to not be in this deck

The more astute of you may have noticed some odd omissions. Why no Dungrove Elder, for instance? The focus of this deck is defense, so I left out the Treefolk that expressly wanted to attack. They’ll all get their time to shine once Doran comes around! Also, the “garden protector” flavor that a lot of these Treefolk have fits well with PvZ; rampaging trees, not so much.

Now for Saprolings, an area I admit I am not too familiar with. I decided to scour some Ghave, Guru of Spores decklists for ideas, since he’s the king of GWB Saprolings. With that and a Gatherer search for Saproling goodies, and I came away with some solid inclusions:

Doubling Season, because it’s always the reason for the Season (and Parallel Lives isn’t as flavorful)

Golgari Germination can help mitigate any fatalities during combat

Greener Pastures is going to trigger every turn for us

Jade Mage can pump out Saprolings whenever you’ve got extra mana

Mycoloth can make a lot of Saprolings, given proper setup

Necrogenesis and Night Soil cut off graveyard antics while making Saps

Saproling Symbiosis seems like it could make for a pretty explosive turn

Selesnya Evangel and Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree can generate only one Saproling at a time, but at least they can do it every turn

Sprout Swarm is a Swiss army knife of Saproling production

Thelonite Hermit is a Saproling lord, and can make some himself if you’ve got the time and mana

Verdant Force can block just about any Zombie, and oh yeah it makes Saprolings every upkeep. His buddy Verdant Embrace can come too.

I’m purposefully avoiding the Fungus/Spike/Thallid route for both flavor and gameplay reasons; Fungi aren’t really Plants, and I don’t wanna get too durdly with +1/+1 and spore counters.

With the remaining slots, I’m just going to fill some holes, add flavorful things, and throw in a few cards that just seem good for this strategy:

Blunt the Assault could buy me a huge bundle of life and another turn from an attack that might otherwise kill me

Seedborn Muse can block, is flavorful, and combos well with the next two cards…

Glare of Subdual, which can make entire combat phases disappear…

…and Earthcraft, which turns every creature you have into a mana dork.

Entangler can allow a high-toughness or indestructible creature to take on as many Zombies as possible. We’ll just pretend that the art features vines or something.

Overrun, Overwhelming Stampede, and Craterhoof Behemoth as additional wincons. We’ll throw in Kamahl, Fist of Krosa too, but that one’s just for me. I loves me some Mirari Saga, and he’s flavorful in this deck.

…and we’ll end this off with some good ol’ ramp (more sunflowers!) in the form of Cultivate, Explosive Vegetation, and Harrow

When it’s all put together with some flashy nonbasic lands, our new Plants deck looks like this:

And there you have it: Plants vs. Zombies as a Magic game. I can’t wait to try it out! If you know some other cards that would fit great in here, be sure to let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter at @setheweinstein.